Die bayerische Landtagswahl vom 14. Oktober 2018: Signal für nachhaltigen Wandel auch im Bund?

The outcome of the election marks a deep shift not only in Bavarian politics but also corresponds to Germany’s ongoing restructuring of its electorate and the changing configuration of its party system at large: (1) The two catch-all parties suffered dramatic losses of more than ten percentage points; the conservative CSU lost its parliamentary majority in the state legislature, tallying less than 40 percent, the social-democratic SPD even less than ten percent of the total vote . (2) The voting behaviour is characterised by high volatility and processes of polarisation, caused by growing cleavages between town and country, between the generational as well as religious divides and the ongoing occupational differentiation in the electorate . Ideologically, these divides correlate with liberal and cosmopolitan mind-sets and (post-)modern urban lifestyles, the main electoral base of the Green party, on the one hand versus the more conservative and traditional rural electorates on the other . Their influence on the newly formed coalition between the CSU and the “Free Voters” will be more pronounced, while the populist and in part anti-pluralist electorate rallies behind the right-wing AfD . (3) In Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria and Hesse, the Green party has now replaced the SPD as the main electoral contender of the Christian-democratic parties; it remains to be seen whether their electoral fortunes can be extended to the northern and eastern parts of the country in the near future .

Mexico defections suggest rivals expect AMLO win

Subject Pre-campaign outlook. Significance A 60-day political pre-campaigning period will end on February 11, culminating in the official appointment of candidates to contest the federal posts up for grabs in July’s elections. Individual parties and coalitions are scheduled to register their electoral platforms and proposals with the electoral authorities by February 15, though the main coalitions have already done so. Impacts Three independents are likely to meet the requirements to contest the presidential election, potentially splitting the vote. A fall in support as the race tightens could see AMLO revert to a more belligerent stance. The successful presidential candidate could secure victory with only around one-third of the total vote.

Reply to Dr. Arrington

We thank Dr. Arrington for his kind words about our article. In this letter we respond to his two main criticisms: that our use of the termbiasin describing the situation facing the Democratic Party in 2006 is misleading and that using total vote to assess the results of the election is preferable to using average district vote, as we did in the article.

The Rise of the Left and Working-Class Voting Behavior in New Zealand: New Methods

The extent to which mainstream left-wing parties attracted working-class votes during the first half of the twentieth century is exceptionally difficult to establish and explain. All of the various methods applied to the subject, including ecological regression of aggregate data, have had their problems, especially the ecological fallacy. A novel solution to these problems, in the context of New Zealand, takes occupational and party voting data at street level as its observations for ten towns from 1911 to 1951, and correlates the data treating each town for each year as a case. The working-class component in the total vote for the Labour Party varied surprisingly by town and followed unexpected trends.

The Non-paradox of Swing

The ‘paradox’ of swing resides in the expectation that ‘if national influences were completely paramount,. swings would not involve identical fractions of the total vote or electorate in each constituency, but a fraction proportional to the prior strength of the party that was losing ground’. The mass of the evidence is however that swings are virtually equal across constituencies. The intention here is to demonstrate that the ‘prior proportional’ expectation is a mistaken one since it leads to a logical contradiction, and therefore that the phenomenon of equal swing is not paradoxical.

The Swing Ratio and Game Theory

We propose a simple game-theory model of single-member plurality electoral systems, two parties with unequal resources being the players. Strategies consist of allocations of resources among the n contests, and a party's payoff is the number of contests to which it has assigned more resources than the other party. Mixed strategies exist which are asymptotically optimal as n increases. Identifying a party's proportion of total resources with its total vote proportion, we predict that the swing ratio, or marginal seat proportion per vote proportion, is 2. This compares to empirical findings which range between 2 and 4, and to the hitherto unexplained cube law, which predicts 3. We suggest that the strategic problem modeled by this game accounts for the major part of the swing ratio effect. Factors which vary from system to system, such as proportion of hard-core support attached to parties, may amplify this effect.

The Impact of the Local Candidate in Canadian Federal Elections

The impact of the local candidate in Canadian federal elections has received scant theoretical or empirical attention. Voting in Canada is usually accounted for in terms of party identification, party leader attraction, ethnicity, and religious affiliation. Possible local candidate influence on electoral outcomes is rarely considered systematically. An observer of British elections placed the average influence of the local candidate at about 10 per cent of the total vote. Morris Davis, in a study of a Halifax two-member constituency, states that the local candidate is responsible for at least 6 per cent of the vote

Bases of Support for Mexico's Dominant Party

The purpose of this paper is to elucidate the bases of support for Mexico's Partido Revolucionário Institucional. A model is developed which identifies the major and minor variables affecting changes in PRI support in the six elections between 1952 and 1967. Throughout the paper the unit of analysis is the state; the dependent variables are voter turnout and the percentage of the total vote in each state received by the PRI.